Application of supercomputers

The cost of a supercomputer from the TOP10 now stands at a very high double digits, often already digit million euro amount. Upwards are no limits. Planning for the new standing in the field by 10 supercomputer PFLOPS are currently almost 700 million euros budgeted. These huge amounts of investment is inevitably the question of what these are needed very expensive equipment and whether the investment in the development of such a device, except for pure prestige, profitable.

Today's supercomputers are used mainly for simulation purposes. The more realistic a simulation of complex relationships, the more processing power is needed in the rule. The advantage of the supercomputer is also that they can take account of their extremely fast and large computing power ever more interdependent. This then allows the inclusion of wider still, often inconspicuous secondary or boundary conditions for the actual simulation, and also guarantee a more meaningful overall.

The current main areas of the supercomputer encompass the areas of biology, chemistry, geology, aerospace, medicine, weather and climate research, military, and physics.

Except for the military, which operates mainly military simulations to identify the areas in that we are dealing with very complex systems or subsystems that are linked to each other far-reaching measure. Thus, changes in one subsystem, usually more or less strong impact on adjacent or connected systems. Through the use of supercomputers, it is always easier to take into account many of these consequences, or even to predict, which could already far ahead of any countermeasures are taken. This applies for example in simulations of climate change, the predictions of earthquakes or volcanic eruptions, as well as in medicine in the simulation of new drugs on the organism. (However, logically, such simulations are only as accurate as it allow the programmed parameters and models for the calculation.) The huge amounts of investment in the steady increase in FLOPS and thus the development of ever-faster supercomputers, especially with the use benefit and the possible " knowledge advantage "is justified for humanity, not from the aspects of the general technological progress.